


only time is ours (the rest we'll just wait and see)

by gabrielgoodman



Category: 1917 (Movie 2019)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Holding Hands, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:47:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23812549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabrielgoodman/pseuds/gabrielgoodman
Summary: “All that – carnage and bloodshed. I’m sick of it, frankly, men dying left and right beneath my thumb,” his hand moves across the air as if he could push it apart, and a smudge of dirt on his forehead catches Joseph’s eyes, strangely out of place on the golden skin, pale when shadows fall across it, shadows panned by nose and the hollows of his eyes. They are dark, those eyes, dark and intelligent, and they have seen – a lot, everything, maybe.-blake and leslie, intertwined.
Relationships: Joseph Blake/Lieutenant Leslie
Comments: 2
Kudos: 36





	only time is ours (the rest we'll just wait and see)

**Author's Note:**

> i watched 1917 yesterday, then this happened. thank you to betsy for beta reading the first half, cheering me on, and motivating me to even start writing for this ship; you see, i am a simple man, I see andrew scott and richard madden in the same movie and i am happy. 
> 
> some notes: i am a history major and i've done a lot, but probably not enough, research for this fic but if sam mendes can take some liberties, so can i. the first world war is not my specialty, that would be the end of the second world war and the international cold war, but i did my best anyway and tried to figure things out. technically, this is set in 1918, when the allied forces were advancing to the hindenburg line in august (in an operation called the hundred days offensive, lasting from august 8th to november 11th) and really beginning to get the upper hand against the german and central forces; the war wouldn't end for another odd months until november, but this offensive played a key part in the victory of the allies and the subsequent armistice. still, I decided to keep it deliberately vague.
> 
> somewhere in this, the word "trousers" is used. it is the british english equivalent of what americans would call _pants_. just saying to prevent any confusion. 
> 
> I'm not a native speaker and it's been a while so apologies for any mistakes beforehand. not all of this has seen a beta reader (as ususal), so I'll come back to always fix things as we go.
> 
> additional note: i wrote half of this while in considerable back pain. 
> 
> title: ben howard - i forget where we were.

The grass is soft beneath his hands, beneath his thighs, as he is sinking into it; there is a strange quality to it, like there should not be anything soft to rest his wrecked body upon, instead there should be dust, dust and rubble, and it should bite into his skinned palms, where blood is caked with dirt and every movement sings. For once, the sun is out, drowning the horrors of the trenches, of wounded men, in liquid gold, all the guts and all the glory and Joseph has to avert his eyes, turning his head away and off to the side to stare at the open field, where the flowers are in bloom. They say that the war is over soon, they are making headway to the Hindenburg line and the Germans are suffering under the intrusion of the allied forces, but all that he can see is the miles and miles of dead bodies. Men dying every day, Men dying everywhere as far as the eye can see and beyond that. Joseph thinks that he has had enough of that.

“That’s a sight, innit?”

He does not notice the man sitting down next to him, it must have been on his other side, on his left, a blind spot. Joseph flinches slightly, an involuntary reaction of his body, like the pin of a grenade pulled out, leaving his brain to decide if he is going to blow up or not. He is not, is the conclusion he comes to, keeping a straight face despite the initial shock. Things have a way of creeping up on you when you have been playing the waiting game as long as they have.

“What?” His ears are ringing constantly, blown out by gunshots and missiles and fucking bombs dropped everywhere.

The man is sitting strangely, he is hunched over, curled forwards and inwards and Joseph’s eyes take him in at once; he is short, clad in uniform, there is a knitted cap pulled clumsily, hastily over his head, holes in it, and a cigarette perched behind his ear as if to whisper comfort into the darkest spots, as if to warm you up when your hands have been frozen for months now and your toes gone. Joseph swallows, gaining an eerily familiar impression of the soldier, an echo of something that he has seen too often and similarly only known from within the depths of his own self. There are tufts of black hair jutting out beneath his dark red hat, gleaming almost a dark indigo in the brightness of day, defying all laws of nature, and the sunlight seems to break on the bones of his cheek, on the cut of his jaw, on the skin damp with constant perspiration. A Shakespearean play of light.

“All that – carnage and bloodshed. I’m sick of it, frankly, men dying left and right beneath my thumb,” his hand moves across the air as if he could push it apart, and a smudge of dirt on his forehead catches Joseph’s eyes, strangely out of place on the golden skin, pale when shadows fall across it, shadows panned by nose and the hollows of his eyes. They are dark, those eyes, dark and intelligent, and they have seen – a lot, everything, maybe.

Joseph finds that he has made the strangest acquaintances during this war. Maybe to fill up the emptiness left behind by the loss of his brother, and the loss of soldiers, the loss of home. Maybe because they all need to pass all this time and need something to hold on to.

“What’s your name?” Joe asks then, right as the man pulls the cigarette from behind his ear and flicks his lighter in one practiced, smooth motion. Almost a nervous tick.

One glance out of deep, brown eyes and the drag of a cigarette later, he gets his answer; it’s a little like a strategic maneuver, all of this. “Ellis, Lieutenant Ellis Leslie,” Leslie responds, his cigarette tugged between his lips in an almost possessive fashion. He holds his hand out to shake it, “You?”

“Lieutenant Joseph Blake, 2nd Devons,” Joseph says and takes Leslie’s – _Ellis’s_ hand, like an offering made. Like a pact sealed. One side of his lips curls up into what could almost be a smile, untainted yet by what has transpired and what he has seen. What he has lost, too.

Leslie’s grip is steady, and he squeezes Joe’s hand barely, palm clammy, his skin unnaturally warm. He must be running a fever; they should get him some medicine. His hand is smaller than Joe’s, almost getting lost in between his fingers like digging into soil, and Joe can only hold on to him, hold on to this moment that seems to stop the flow of time, and he can hear the birds singing above them, their own little song.

Joseph swallows, and they let go of each other.

“Blake?” Leslie notes, a curious undercurrent in his voice but mild as if he could _not_ bear to muster up enough interest to truly be intrigued.

He tilts his head slightly, fingers brushing past soft grass again while his brows furrow and move into a frown; like this, his mother always used to say that Joseph looked older than his own age, older than he ought to be and so much more like his father. Tom never looked like that, Tom was all slopes and round edges, and sweet dimples, Tom was as gentle as the grass catching the breeze and a bird’s song. Tom was never meant to follow Joe into battle, not if he would have known what was good for him.

“What?” He asks Leslie, “You knew my brother?”

Leslie is quiet for a moment, the tip of his cigarette a burnt orange in the afternoon sun, the white of the smoke lost in the bright haze. “I met your brother, I didn’t _know_ him,” And he raises one finger up towards the sky. “There’s a difference.”

Joseph supposes he’s right, but he doesn’t care much for it, and he reaches into his pocket, his hand curling around his brother’s ring as if it could bring him back from the dead. Foolish, there is nothing to bring a man back from death, once they are gone, they are gone, just another casualty worth a ribbon and a medal, a useless price for mortality. Something to pin somewhere, heaven only knows where.

“Met him and the other boy, whatever his name was, I can’t remember, I was half delirious with the flu. I heard about him though,” A pause, and Leslie looks at him out of the corners of his eyes and his gaze softens, like a wave. “I’m sorry. He was very brave when many men couldn’t even get up off their feet.”

There is bitterness on his tongue, coating his throat and it sears inside his eyes; Joseph reaches for breath he still doesn’t quite know where to get from, like Tom took it all with him.

“Saved your life, didn’t he?” Leslie asks and it sounds like he already knows the answer.

Joe nods.

“Well, I’m glad.”

*

It turns out that Lieutenant Ellis Leslie has been fighting the flu on and off for what must have been months now, if not more than a year. Someone has told Joseph that he has always looked sickly, especially in the cold months of winter that they are dreading for they only bring sickness and decay, stagnation, thick blankets of snow filling up the trenches and making them almost impossible to inhabit.

Joseph fucking hates the trenches.

August is rolling over into September and they are all still stuck here. At least there is more air, a greater sense of victory now that the forces are charging forward and the Huns seem to retreat, maybe only momentarily but better they are than attacking them and killing even more soldiers; Leslie – _Ellis_ told him he had men die for every fucking mile of No Man’s Land, making it theirs and claiming it, getting it back. Joseph can only nod, he would rather not think too much about who had to die for what mile, who had to die with every mile, who died making those miles. He thinks of his brother when he stares into the sun, and it’s just as painful as when Schofield told him. The pain hasn’t faded yet.

He’s sitting in a tent, on a chair next to a makeshift bed; Ellis is laying on it, breathing heavily as if a tank was rolling over his chest, wheezing slightly whenever he exhales. The sound isn’t good by any means, a symphony that has taken up every single of Joseph’s waking hours and that haunts him in his dreams just as much. He hasn’t left Ellis’s side for longer than thirty minutes in the past few weeks, has been sitting here while the nurse would fuss around them and glare at him disapprovingly; men don’t sit by other men and watch them labor, they don’t watch them suffer and heal, not like this anyway.

But his brother is dead, and Joseph has nothing left to lose anymore, so at night he will sit on the same chair and hold on to Ellis’s hand, when he is too weak and exhausted to bitch about it, drowsy from the medicine and the fever that flares up.

“Have you nowhere else to be, Joe?” Ellis’s voice sounds frail, brittle like an ashen house, but there is some mirth still and that is what he likes to hold on to, like their fingers intertwined in the peace of darkness descending. His eyes blink open and what used to be an endless pool for Joseph to get lost in, is now glazed over and blunt; when he smokes these days, the cough rattles him. It must be pneumonia that he never quite recovered from.

It’s not a death sentence, even if at times it feels like one.

“Afraid not, Lieutenant,” he replies, and he smiles, he can feel it form on his face in a gentle manner, the blue of Joseph’s eyes so striking in the monochrome of the tent; they won’t send him out anymore and he is glad because he wouldn’t know what he would do if he would have to leave – _this_ behind. It doesn’t do him any good to pine over something that should never be but here he is, doing it anyway, wasting away in turns of day and night that keep reflecting, as if they want to mock this cycle of devastation. Joseph should know better and he does, but there is a cavity inside his chest, hollow like a dugout, that has been yearning, that needs to be filled with something else than shame, that needs this, whatever it is. Unspoken, holy almost.

Ellis’s face is pale and unnaturally so, and Joseph cannot do anything else but sit here and hopefully offer him comfort; when he begins to shiver, Joe will lay another blanket over him or offer him his coat to put on and when he runs hot, Joe finds rags and cloth to soak in cool water, trying to avert his eyes from collarbones revealed when Leslie is stripping off some layers, the hollow of his throat that draws Joseph’s gaze in like a starved man craves a full meal; or like wired fence; if he gets too close, he might cut himself. 

All of this is no good, all of this is terrible. _So terribly devoted_.

He reaches out, mindlessly because they are alone, and pushes Ellis’s damp hair off his forehead. The gesture is so unnaturally kind that it feels out of place here, amongst death and ailments, sickness, and the like, but he cannot help himself. Even like this, Ellis is beautiful, and the thought alone taints Joseph’s soul in ways he cannot fathom and would have his mother hate his guts if she ever knew about it. If he still had the strength to do so, he would care about that, but all his caring, all this loving has been stolen and used up. 

Lieutenant Leslie shakes his head practically unnoticeably, disapprovingly; when he does that, the fact that he is some years older than Joseph becomes so apparent, it’s quite frankly startling.

“Oh, Joe,” he says in a rough whisper, as if to scold him, “sweet Joseph.”

Joe stops for a moment before he grabs Ellis’s hand again, bowing down to kiss the back of it only once.

It feels like too much already.

*

By late September, Joseph has fallen asleep sitting upright more times than flat on his back, a sweaty hand curled into his own like an anchor keeping him right where he is. Ellis never talks about it in his lucid moments, stark and clear as day, what they are doing when they go unnoticed, what they can get away with as two lieutenants (not much, the stakes are high but the death toll is higher – no one really cares about two men like them, worse for wear and only with only one pair of healthy lungs and one set of working ears, but there are eyes everywhere, trained to spot for irregular patterns, movements unbelonging to their surroundings like Germans invading). Joe has become quite comfortable in his chair though, having the nurses show him how to help instead of just uselessly slouching around; these hands shake too much to aim a rifle but they shake just enough to revive someone, enough pressure to a chest, or enough strength of grip to tie off a bloody limb. There is purpose behind the brutality when he must saw a bone. There is another purpose for liquor when he disinfects the cut of barbwire.

Of course, Ellis only has spiteful indifference for Joseph’s newly found workplace when the fever goes down and he has enough stamina to lift a cigarette to his lips, feigning ignorance to the way Joe’s eyes will hang on his mouth wrapped around, and how he will flick the lighter for him, to make it easier, to be there, to offer anything and everything he has to give in minor movements. As small as they are, they fall on a major scale; it is not lost on either of them. Ellis might snarl but he never bites; Ellis might look like a wreck, but he is not yet lost or torn apart, Joseph can see the threads he is hanging on to, like spiderwebs in the late summer’s sun.

It is a quiet day in the tent, and Ellis has been asleep with his arm covering most of his face as if to shield it from Joseph’s thoughtful gaze. Joe doesn’t mind for he has spent more hours memorizing Ellis’s face than thinking about his brother, because one of these things hurts more than the others. Trade the innocence of baby blue eyes for dark, faded and timeless as sin itself, trade it like your honor that won’t buy you any peace of mind but instead might find you a safe place to sleep at night. Try to accept it and if it’s the last thing you’ll do.

Joseph’s been running his fingers through a worn notebook, the corners turning yellow like the leaves outside, weighing it in his hand. It’s like a beacon of memory, filled to the brim with things he cannot remember on his own anymore: How Tom would climb onto his back to pick the cherries off the trees; how his mother would make different variations of jam all weekend long and fill the kitchen with the sticky-sweet, syrupy smell of cooked fruit and sugar, brothers swimming in the lake behind their backyard in the summer at the crack of dawn, and how their father would show Joe how to hold a gun and how to shoot it. 

“What are you thinking about in that pretty head of yours?”

He didn’t expect Ellis to wake up quite so soon, but he sounds well-rested, and that is all Joe can tell when he turns his head to look at him.

“What?”

Ellis sighs, not quite rolling his eyes but something akin to it prowling onto his face, into those sunken features.

“I said, _what are you thinking about in that pretty head of yours_?” He repeats himself, enunciating properly this time and Joseph finally understands what he is saying to him. Ellis is shaking his head again, a motion that is as familiar to Joe as the back of his hand, the miles of meadow stretching out beyond the tents, “I do believe that you are too pretty for your own good, it makes looking at you a horrible thing.”

Joseph snorts; he can’t really help himself when Ellis is spouting such nonsense, when he was as good as on his deathbed just weeks prior but it’s well and fine to know that he hasn’t lost any of his humor. The victories he counts are small and precious, this is among them even though he won’t be able to parade it around, and frankly he doesn’t want to. He wants to keep Leslie all for himself, a selfish notion, an ugly thought, but one so present it is taking over all of his senses, his skin itching to be touched and caressed, his eyes memorizing the same shapes and forms, the same angles over and over again, his nose picking up the scent so inherently _Ellis_ beneath the stench of sweat and sickness, his dreams filled to the brim with the lieutenant, it would embarrass every good catholic.

Joseph is neither good nor particularly faithful anymore. Not to the church or the country anyway.

They could dissert, he thinks, mulling and brooding over the thought when Ellis is asleep; two ( _three_ ) men gone out of sixteen hundred saved is a fairly good deal, isn’t it? He knows no one would miss them, there is nothing they left behind to mourn for two lost souls. What is keeping them, then?

It’s a useless idea, that. Maybe.

“I’m – not thinking about much. How are you feeling?” Joe replies eventually, belatedly, while Ellis is staring at him, for once patient, but boring holes into his head all the while. If he could crack his skull and look inside his brain, Joe is sure that Ellis would, this restless curiosity about him, the quiet discontent at not being able to read him like a book, or like a map charting enemy territory. Ellis is much smarter than Joseph, it is not like he is unaware of that, watching this man he has chosen choose his words just as carefully.

“Better. Vile, still, I would kill to brush my teeth, but I can breathe. Haven’t felt _that_ in quite some time,” Ellis says, and he has his eyes still carefully measured on Joe, like he cannot keep them off him even if he tried. Even when he was in a state half delirious and fever drenched, he kept looking at Joe and that should be enough to have any mortal fall for you, it should be enough to bring any man to his knees; someone trusting you so implicitly with their life that you are the last thing they want to see.

Joe smiles. _Foreign_. “I’m gonna find you a toothbrush, might bribe some nurses into handing it over.” The book is closed between the palms of his hand, a prayer held in proximity to his chest now, if he were a praying man. “I cannot guarantee toothpaste though.”

Ellis chuckles and while it does still sound like sandpaper, the fact that there is enough spirit inside of him is enticing; perhaps this war is going to end after all.

“You are a saint, aren’t you, Joseph Blake?”

It sounds so easy, said like that, like Joe didn’t abandon all his faith when the world abandoned all of them, left in these trenches, dead on the battlefield, when life abandoned his brother, when _Joe_ abandoned his brother, when he got drafted, when he came here, shipped over, when he should have – when he should have made sure that Tom stays safe at any cost so his mother wouldn’t have to mourn her only worthy son – when he, when he, _when he_ –

He sucks in air through his teeth, his gaze far away and his frown ever-present now, “I wouldn’t say so.”

A cold hand wraps around his forearm where the cuff of his uniform shirt is sullied by dried blood, that irony isn’t lost on him, pale against olive, dark against light, a touch so simple it would make the willows weep, and Joseph’s eyes wander from Ellis’s bruised knuckles over the thin, blue-veined wrist, up the frazzled wool sweater he is wearing to ward off the cold, to slight shoulders and lastly, up the valley of his throat and past his lips to the forgiveness of his eyes.

“But your brother was, right?” Ellis croaks. He sounds unlike himself, besides himself, a different person entirely.

A squeeze, fingers warming up, Joe can feel it so acutely that his skin is beginning to burn and prickle, a pin drop multiplied into thousands and millions.

“Yes,” Joe says simply, almost in lieu of an actual answer. “Yes, he is.”

One of them awaits damnation. Joseph knows who it will be.

*

_“The Hindenburg Line was attacked several times in 1917, notably at St Quentin, Bullecourt, the Aisne and Cambrai and was broken in September 1918 during the Hundred Days Offensive.”_

*

They are going home. It’s a surreal feeling, to get the word, the papers, to have it manifesting in his hands and an aimless existence finally gaining momentum again, a goal too, something to look forward to that is not just this endless bloodshed and bleary, repetitive days in tents. He misses picking cherries in the summer, he misses waking up in total silence without the whimpers and groans of soldiers and patients dying around him, succumbing to the unjust violence, and he misses life the way it was before this war. He wants to sleep in cotton sheets that smell clean and crisp, he wants to put on something that isn’t an uniform, something that is not fucking green, he wants to lay down in the grass and inhale the fresh, untouched gentleness of it all, he wants the breeze to tangle in his hair.

Joseph longs for this, and at the same time he knows he cannot return home to his mother, not forever at least. There is a reason why he had readily agreed to Schofield writing the letter, granting him authorial ownership over Tom’s heroics that would undoubtedly bestow honor upon the Blake’s, a legacy for their family for generations to come. The thought leaves a bitterness beneath his tongue that he cannot seem to escape, like blood.

“Chin up, Joe. You look as if you were just handed your eulogy,” Ellis drawls, the shadow of his smile clinging to his cheeks, rosy like the flowers once in bloom the first time they met. He looks much healthier now, and the nurses have assured Joseph that he is going to make a full recovery if he is going to take care of him. Ellis seems like a man destined to drive himself into the ground, the kind of personality made for this war, and Joseph cannot bear to stand witness to it, so he has decided to personally assure his safety.

“What’s it to you?” Joe says, empty. He has nothing left to say here.

They are standing beneath an oak tree, looking over the tents and the men packing up their stuff, nurses busy to leave no one behind, clean bills of health passed around, others watching it all play out and wishing it upon themselves; what once bonded all of them has now found an end and their roads might never cross again.

Ellis’s hand slips into his, half hidden by their trousers, as if to say he can finally tell what Joseph is thinking about, as if to promise him he won’t leave. Joe turns his head, resting his forehead against Ellis’s shoulder and closing his eyes; the nurses knitted a new cap for Ellis and it is in a warm shade of mustard like spring has sprung. Their fingers fit together mindlessly now, a physical trigger that slots them together seamlessly, a shelter holding tightly, a line unable to cross or barge through. It seems impossible to shatter this touch, purity renewing Joseph’s blood and washing him clean and free of his sins.

_Peace_. It rests heavily upon their unmoving figures. Still, in the wind.

“A great many things, Lieutenant Blake. A great many things,” Ellis murmurs and his lips find the top of Joseph’s head, pressing into his hair, the curls there that seem to ignite with the autumnal sun, against all laws of nature. Someone must have designed them to fit like this, Joseph thinks, someone must have wanted them to find each other in midst of this wasteland, vast and open and distraught and full of possibilities and _hope_ , so much hope it makes you nauseous.

“If that is so,” Joseph murmur, his grip only growing stronger, holding on and on and on, and not letting go. “I know a place where we could go, in England. A cottage, it is – it is nothing much, but it is enough to settle down. I could look after you, you could recover fully,” and he adds as what could pass as an afterthought if he’d be that careless, “There are cherry trees in the yard too.”

Ellis smiles. Joe cannot see it, but he can feel it in the tense set of his shoulders slowly unraveling, relaxing underneath the weight of Joe’s head, the smooth skin of his temple against the war-torn fabric of his coat.

“That would be a sight,” Ellis voice is so soft, it could get lost in between them and Joseph must strain to make out what he is saying.

“Wouldn’t it?”

> _“and that’s how summer passed, oh:_
> 
> _the great dividing range, the green, green grass, and, oh;_
> 
> _maybe it was peace at last, who knew?”_

**Author's Note:**

> It is stated in the script that lieutenant leslie's "face shines with sweat, his voice is croaky, full of flu, a little delirious." I don't think it is too far fetched to assume that he might have had the spanish flu as it broke out in the north region of france in 1916; a second, more deadly wave hit in 1918. the uk troop staging in étaples has been theorized to be the center of the first outbreak which isn't too far from écoust-saint-mein (a day's march, a few hours by car). he probably has the spanish flu in this, of course joseph doesn't know that. i said leslie lives because i want him to. 
> 
> the quote about the hindenburg line is directly taken from the hindenburg line wikipedia entry. 
> 
> I figured joseph might be hard of hearing as a result of the war; it was the first thing I thought when he asked twice for schofield's name. 
> 
> anyway. thank you so much for reading!
> 
> hmu on my twitter @dvidcorenswet


End file.
